By Amanda Silberling: For Complete Post, Click Here…
Sometimes, new Twitter features can be divisive — we’ve made our feelings clear about the edit button, which is apparently in the works. But we can (hopefully) all agree that simple accessibility features are a good thing.
For a while now, Twitter has made it easy to add alt text to image uploads, allowing tweeters to provide a description of an image to aid people who use screen readers or speech-to-text programs. But until now, you haven’t been able to see what images do or do not have alt text if you weren’t using a screen reader yourself — so, for example, if you wanted to make sure that the content that you retweet was accessible to followers who might be Blind or have limited vision, you’d just have to retweet and hope for the best.
After a successful test last month, Twitter is rolling out two additions to its alt text feature. Starting today, images with alt text will contain an “ALT” badge in the corner of the image. When you hover over the badge, you’ll see the user-generated image description.